Beholding the Beauty

The older I get, the less patience I have when it comes to theological discussions, at least online. I was recently reminded of this. For some odd reason, I was under the impression that a particular forum I'm part of online was a Christian group, and so I was participating in the various discussions with a basic understanding that we were all at least working from the same fundamental worldview. However, in one particular discussion, one of the moderators jumped into remind everyone (particularly me) that this was NOT a Christian group per se. Upon this revelation, I realized that I really don't care to participate in the group anymore. (This sort of surprised me as somewhat uncharacteristic of me.) I wrote up a private reply for the moderator, but I don't think I'm going to send it to him, considering that it might be a little "too much". Nevertheless, in the writing I gained a little insight into my newfound curmudgeonliness: [Redacted], I was unaw...

Introduction Icons, images, idols. Do you know the difference? Many today do not know the differences among these three words, and so they either avoid such things, or fall into idolatry. Let me give a brief explanation of the history and meanings of these three words. WARNING : What you are about to read may alter the way you think in ways you cannot reverse and cannot ignore. If you'd rather just not know, close the page now. Proceed with caution. Images There is a whole long discussion that can be had over how the human mind is a pattern recognition engine, and how this allows for symbols to be. There is another whole long discussion about what symbols are in the first place. But I will skip both of those and simply say that an image is fundamentally a composition of components such that they form a recognizable pattern. An image is always an pattern evocative of some other pattern, whether assembled with intent (as in a building, or some such), or by "nature...